


Ficsnips

by thatyourefuse



Category: Ashes to Ashes, Criminal Minds, Doctor Who (2005), His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Life on Mars (UK), Skins (UK), Spooks | MI-5, Velvet Goldmine, Wire in the Blood
Genre: A2A finale spoilers, AU, F/F, F/M, LoM finale spoilers, actually porn, gen like canon, miscellany, not-quite-porn, short form
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-03-01
Updated: 2011-03-23
Packaged: 2017-10-16 01:07:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 5,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatyourefuse/pseuds/thatyourefuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tiny bits of fiction in multiple fandoms. Updated irregularly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony and Carol. Post-"Synchronicity."

_I tell my love to wreck it all  
cut out all the ropes and let me fall_

The skydiving wasn’t figurative.

Tony doesn’t enjoy it unequivocally -- she can tell -- but they can both say they’ve done it now: thrown themselves out of a perfectly good airplane with nothing but a bloom of silk-thin nylon to slow their fall. For herself, Carol delights in it more than she should, once she can bring herself to look down: she feels both inexpressibly tiny, a seed caught on the wind, and vast enough to contain the miles of world stretched out beneath her.

There are drinks afterwards, and Indian food, once they’ve both stopped shaking enough to call for a cab, and Tony tears off a piece of naan and scoops up yogurt with it -- quite neatly -- and says “I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of falling from a great height.”

“Have you, now.” She’s drained: dizzy and battered empty by the wind and the adrenaline. Very lucid, not an unpleasant feeling at all. “I didn’t just participate in some sort of diverted suicide attempt, did I?”

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that.” Tony actually seems to be considering the question seriously; she experiences a great upswell of tenderness towards him, from his busy hands to the poor shaved patch on his head where they’ve taken the stitches out. “Call it a near-death experience. No. That’s not right. A salutation of it. An acceptance.”

“I’m going mad,” Carol informs him, and licks curry from her fingertips. “That almost made sense.”

“Of course it did.” He’s sitting close enough, on his unforgivable sofa, that she can feel the whole thing creak when he shifts his weight. “What did you think you were doing?”

“Following you,” she says, without thinking.

He exhales. The moment stretches out to an infinite thinness, a hair split and split again without breaking. She feels outside herself, she feels translucent, light breaking through brighter than anything that’s ever been in this room.

“I do too, you know,” he says.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A2A. Finale spoilers. Gaimanesque.

_and you sang “sail to me  
sail to me, let me enfold you  
here I am, here I am  
waiting to hold you”_

In the end he’ll forget them all, one by one. Sam’s smile, Alex’s eyes. Ray and Chris and Shaz and Annie and the ones before them and the ones after. Waves frozen in a heart-stopping second before breaking and scattering on the shore.

The cars change, the clothes, the music. Every time the world’s given back to him it’s come farther away from ration books and Gary Cooper and the cold little house at the end of the redbrick lane. More names to mourn, more decades like drops of mercury running and pooling together into one. Always a hand leaving his, at the end, in the dark.

One day he won’t be needed anymore: the door will close behind him, the stars shine bright and innocent and empty. One day he’ll be a name on a fading headstone, bought and raised by men who hadn’t been born when his death reforged the world.

Before then he’ll love you, too. You’ll break his heart.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asriel. Marisa. Started to be porn, didn't quite make it.

_sharpen the heel of your boot  
and press it to my chest_

Their paths cross again in Reykjavik, when their daughter is seven years old: the scandal is faded news, such that her hostess can ask her in all innocence if she’s heard he’ll be in town another week. There’s something like awe in the woman’s voice, and something like guilty buried lust -- the English wife of a Danish politician, out here at the fringes of their empire, she’s sustained on letters of gossip from home -- and Marisa turns a silver fork over and over in her hand and imagines driving it into her own wrist. The mortification of the flesh.

Her daemon bares his teeth, and the woman’s sleek white mouse scurries up to hide in her sleeve.

She takes no particular pains to avoid him, despite it all: to change a scrap of her life for him would be to admit defeat. They meet at the symphony, three days later, her in pearls and him sunburned and escorting a shockingly young blonde girl who’s gone from his side by the second movement. Marisa, in her box behind her opera glasses, can feel a thin twanging tie between them, as palpable as that between man and daemon: he seems always to be ostentatiously glancing away whenever she looks at him, but she can just make out the fur standing up along Stelmaria’s back.

“My dear Lady Disdain,” he says in the crush bar at intermission: instead of “hello,” instead of looking at her. She remembers loving to watch him turn this face on others -- how arrogantly beautiful he’d seemed -- and an unwilling trickle of desire pours cold through her veins. “Respectable as ever, I see.”

 _To tell you that I love you would be absurdly understating it,_ he wrote to her once. _I love you neither patiently nor kindly: I love you with the worst of my nature and for the worst of yours. I love your cruelty and your perversity and your greed -- everything about you but your husband and your good name. I love you selfishly, violently, and idolatrously, and I refute the false modesty of pretending to be uncertain about your feelings in return._

“I’ve nothing to say to you,” she tells him, and rounds out the evening kissing him furiously in the back of a hired cab, on the way to his hotel -- his hands in her hair, her daemon’s claws scratching at Stelmaria’s throat.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ten. River. Asgard. Some borrowing from Diane Duane, but she started it.

He meets River for his second time and her -- he can’t really tell -- at the Crossings about a year afterwards: when he comes back from the Stationmaster’s office, she’s leaning against the TARDIS eating a lemon ice and looking perfectly comfortable in a leather getup that has all eighteen of a passing Traxian’s eyestalks turned to stare at her.

“Hello, sweetie,” she says, and hugs him, before he can push any words out past the lump in his throat. “Asgard, I’m afraid,” she adds, sweeping both hands out to indicate the costume. “I’m presenting at a conference -- well -- five hours ago, local time. Tomorrow really.”

“And you look wonderful,” he says, his hearts contracting in his chest. “Very -- black. Very strappy. Very good, actually. Must be nice, Asgard, this time of year.”

She smiles wickedly, knowingly, eyes full of things he might not know for centuries. “It’s lovely. Fancy a ride?”

They assemble a lunch from the shops -- bread and three sorts of jam and little spicy things in a heated box and a pint each of ice cream in a cold one, and four bottles of lemony Arcadian beer -- and step through the worldgate together, and climb up eighteen flights of stairs to sit and eat on the roof of the Royal Museum Tower in Asgard City as the first moon rises and the worst heat leaches out of the day, leaving the air blood-warm and faintly stirred. They don’t say much, once they’ve amused themselves picking out landmarks they both know. River lies stretched out next to him, head pillowed on his jacket, licking the last of the spicy things from her fingers; all the setting sun seems to be concentrated in her skin, and he wonders what they have-will-shall-have-been to each other, that she died in the way she’ll be willing to.

In Gallifreyan, that sentence is grammatical. He wonders if she knows it.

“You’re quiet,” she says. “For you. What’s going on in that brain?”

He thinks of the way she looked at Donna. He thinks of her curls and that white helmet. He thinks Zoe-Adric-Jamie-Fitz-Romana, and lost languages, and that there’s a universe out there where John Smith got everything he wanted. He thinks, _I’ve got all our history yet to come_.

“Ah, not much,” he says. “Pass the Rocky Road, would you?”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hotch. Emily. Not a love song.

_would I were beside her  
she’s a long one, such a long one_

In another lifetime, it might have been a love story.

He works with beautiful women. He’s not blind to that. Another man might or might not have picked her out as the best of them -- Emily with her legs and her eyes and the bladed sweep of her profile. Her stubborn awkward integrity, the way she sleeps sitting up, with her elbows pulled in, as though even unconscious she’s trying to lessen the amount of space she takes.

There’s a lot of history there. He thinks he knows something like it.

What he’s sure he knows are the statistics. Broken marriages (broken and then ground to dust). Inappropriate attachments. The emotional affair.

The length of time (on average) before he’ll want to touch another human being again.

None of them ought to be in the field.

So he’s not in love with her. He lets her hover over him, because it hurts less than the look in her eyes when he tells her to go away, and he sits across from her on the plane and watches her stare out at the clouds, and he doesn’t wonder about a life where he and Hayley split up years ago: it’s not in him to contemplate. He doesn’t even confide in her so often: he’s got Dave and JJ and his fucking Bureau-ordered counselor to try and listen to him, when he feels like talking.

In Minneapolis on the night before liftoff they drink shots in the hotel bar, going one for one long after everyone else is in bed, and maybe there’s a moment and maybe there isn’t; maybe he hasn’t been single since high school and he’s got no idea how other women work; maybe she leans on his arm a little too heavily as he helps her out of the elevator and maybe he’s making the whole damn thing up because fixating on an untouchable coworker is the safest sex there is, and maybe she’d kiss him back. Maybe she wouldn’t.

He dragged her back into this. She shouldn’t have forgiven him yet.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> LoM. Sam. Post-finale.

_throw me a line, I’m sinking fast  
clutching at straws, can’t make it_

Gene insists on dancing with Annie at the reception. It’s frankly a terrifying sight, but they seem to be enjoying themselves.

It’s been -- not that he’s counting -- six months and eighteen days. The radio’s stopped pleading with him. He supposes that means he’s -- you know -- in no state to hear them anymore, but all the cliches are true: he’s never felt more alive. Or shell-shocked (imagine him _married_ ), or glad to be home. For all he knows what’s coming, just a few years down the line.

Ray jogs his elbow hard and slurs something like _lucky bastard, Tyler_ , and Sam laughs and says “Yeah. Yeah, I am,” and ducks the inevitable presumably-friendly punch on the arm.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Velvet Goldmine. Mandy. Language warning.

_well the marriage vow is very sacred_

She spends the first month of the after-Brian about how she spent the last month of having him: drunk to fuck and buried in warm moving bodies, because she _can_. She’s young and she’s alive and her tits are still hanging in there so really, fuck him, fuck _him_ , and why not? Why pretend it was ever about anything bigger than that?

Shannon the cunt or someone got him a better lawyer than she’d ever managed, so the money’s all tied up in God knows what and she might actually be penniless, but it doesn’t _matter_ : she’s Mandy-fucking-Slade and she’s not giving the name back, and she’s not going to starve. Worst comes to worst, she can bugger off to Berlin and sleep on Jack Fairy’s floor next to Curt, who sent her an actual no-joke telegram after it hit the papers: _Mandy stop Sorry about everything stop Don’t write back if you don’t want to stop._

 _Stop._

And the thing of it is, the real bitch, the comedown headache of them all, is she never loved a single thing that wasn’t tied up in him. All the music, the books, the poetry, it’s all got his name right on it; she scrubs herself up one evening and goes to see _Morocco_ at some friend’s friend’s shitty revival house, and all she can think is lying in bed playing greatest-movie-endings, and that kicking off your shoes and following someone into the desert is _significantly fucking overrated_ once you’ve tried it. She cries anyway, because she’ll always be stupid just like that.

There’s a way out of this, or a way back through the heart of it, somewhere in the world. Somewhere there’s a man or a woman or a drink or a line or a poem that can wash it all away, give her back the words and the beauty and the future in sequin colors. The space-god love-rock what-the-fuck-ever of it all that she believed in, before she carved out her own heart to try and live up to it.

And if there isn’t, fine, fucking fine, because she’s not going _anywhere_ either way.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A2A. Alex/Keats. Betrayal.

_I am you and you are me but we are nothing_

She kisses Jim Keats on the pavement thirty seconds after leaving Gene behind. It feels inevitable. It feels like falling, like the last drink, like a shock wave battering against her skin, and for all that she wants it; his mouth is cold, and she doesn’t love him, and desire slices through her wherever his hands touch. There’s a horrible, flinching relief in it -- in coming to the end of herself, in knowing what she can’t stand to know.

He fucks her over her desk, ten minutes later, and she doesn’t shut her eyes and doesn’t pretend she’s anywhere but where she is, with him; Gene held her as though she’d vanish, and Keats bites her neck, and she comes for him more easily than she has in her life. Over and over, racking through her hard enough to be frightening, and her history is a thousand thousand lies and betrayals and destructions narrowing down to this one moment, to her howling into his hand pressed over her mouth.

He kisses her again afterwards and leaves her with the photos scattered across the desk; man, scarecrow, weathervane, cards from a nightmare tarot. She’s exhausted in every fiber, every imaginary cell, and no one will be coming to carry her home.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skins. Tony. Effy. AU from 3.08. Gen like canon.

_I keep falling in and out of love with you  
I never loved anyone the way I do you_

Effy’s fuckhead little boyfriend rings him up at oh-arsehole-thirty in the morning, sounding measurably less coherent than anyone he’s ever encountered, so that it takes a good three minutes before Tony can extract even an Anwar-quantity of sense from him.

“Slow down, whatever your name is,” he says. “What? Jesus, _what_? Shit. All right. I’ll text you the address. Put her on.”

He’d recognize Effy’s breathing anywhere, and he’d have to; she gives a tiny, gulping sigh and says his name so quietly the phone barely picks it up, and Jesus _fucking_ Christ, he’s not away a year and some sixth-form twat’s managed to break her. Or a pair of them have, from the sound of it, but then trust her never to do the thing halfway.

Fuckhead the first, the vaguely responsible one, turns out to look even more of a wanker than he might have predicted -- his face actually looks scientifically designed to be punched -- but Tony barely spares him a look: Effy’s in the passenger seat, Effy who’s grown since the last time he saw her, a lengthening in the bone that seems to have hollowed her out. Effy who looks rougher than he’s ever seen her, after the accident, after her fucking overdose, unconscious in hospital she didn’t look this bad --

“Go home,” he says to fuckhead, after she’s been handed out of the car -- wrapped in his fucking comforter, like she’s freezing, and she won’t let him take it away. “You don’t know where she’s gone. Tell all your cunt friends.

“Chelle’s fucked off,” he tells her, once fuckhead’s burned rubber: it’s to the point where it doesn’t bother him to say. “Just you and me, sis.”

She doesn’t make a sound, doesn’t _move_ , until just as he’s positive he’s going to have to carry her again -- her sparrow-boned little weight, and she’s taller, but if she’s put on an ounce since that night he’ll be seriously surprised -- she says “ _Love_ ” and bursts into thin, exhausted tears.

“Nothing like it,” he agrees. “Come on. Let’s hose you down.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spooks. Tessa/Zoe. I always go for the crazy ones.

_I am the ground-zero ex-friend you ordered  
disguised as a hero to get past your borders_

When it comes to people she thinks she knows she can trust, Zoe Reynolds oughtn’t be allowed out on her own. Tessa could find it ingenuous, if she so chose, or even charming, as opposed to what it is: useful and eventually fatal. _There’s nothing more dangerous_ , she considers telling the girl, _than a spook with all the brains and none of the temperament_ ; but it suits her that Zoe be flawed in this particular way, cracked just wide enough open to leave a fingerhold for anyone who cares to exploit it.

As long as _anyone_ is herself.

For someone who lies for a living, too, Zoe is _painfully_ transparent: Tessa’s spent enough interesting times in the field to notice it when someone’s vibrating at the sight of her. It’s the sort of flattering attention she’d all but given up on drawing without putting some effort behind it -- which she does, as soon as she’s noticed, and Zoe responds like the newest and naivest of targets. She falls, for God’s sake, for the coffee trick.

Getting her into bed is a matter of days, not weeks, after that; and of kissing the _I don’t normally do this_ right off her pretty mouth, and of learning the particular rhythm of hard and slow that sends her screaming off the edge. It never hurt anyone to cultivate an asset in the presence of their enemies (and _wouldn’t_ Harry like to know), and to be perfectly honest -- as she likes to believe she always is with herself -- the sheer physical side of it isn’t bad either. She’d even almost acknowledge being attached.

She goes to the meeting on Hampstead Heath not knowing -- for once -- what it is she expects to gain as a result of it; seeing Zoe in a panic is almost satisfying, in an odd way like probing at a half-healed wound, and if pressed she supposes she’d admit to hopes of turning her. Of being -- what? -- partners in crime, apprentice and master, of being able to laugh with _someone_ at the stupidity of it. How sentimental, at her age.

But there’s an undercurrent to it, too, one she doesn’t recognize until she’s in Harry’s office listening to him blather about pensions and _integrity_ : it’s the ghost of what got her involved with Johnny Marks, what thrilled in her veins every time she spun intuition and bullshit into a credible debriefing. If she falls, she’s always known, she’ll go down in flames, and by her own doing: Zoe the chance too far, the bullet in the chamber, the last gorgeous risk of them all.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alex/Keats, take 2

_I’m not the lucky one  
I’m what happens when the world forgets we’re here_

What he does, it’s a function. He doesn’t romanticize it, doesn’t build it up: it’s only seeing the law laid down. No exceptions, no special cases -- Hunt offends him in his bones, all those back doors, all those pardons. And that from an overgrown child who claims to know what being a copper means.

And _he’s_ the one they’d all die for. It’s enough to make you spit.

“How does he do it?” he asks Alex, tucked up safely in her flat with a cheap bottle to help her face the world. They’ll have to work on that once she’s his. “What has he ever done to earn respect from someone like you?”

Alex’s eyes go faraway, and he could kill Gene Hunt where he stands if the man would lie down and bloody die.

“Better question,” he adds before she can answer. “What would he have to do to lose it?” He takes her hand, and she allows it; she’s wide open, innocent of boundaries, and when he strokes the ridge of her knuckles she shudders like a stolen thing. He’s touching skin Hunt’s touched, taking possession of what the man imagines belongs to him, and when she kisses him rather than answer he imagines he can taste smoke and salt on her tongue.

It would be as easy as this to get Hunt to fuck him himself, as easy as freeing her arms from her sleeves; it would be and perhaps he will, but it wouldn’t be half so satisfying as taking what’s already his.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spooks. Ruth. Harry. I'm really almost pleased with this as a first effort.

_what comes is better  
than what came before_

She was briefly hunted with a crossbow yesterday. She hit a man with a branch. Some people might consider that an excuse to phone in sick; those people -- she decides only somewhat regretfully as Fidget attempts to rouse her by walking on her hair -- don’t work with a lot of other people for whom that’s a normal job hazard. Aren’t needed for much of anything, really, but getting the coffee in and pretending to look busy.

Besides, if she stays home to nurse her trauma she might wind up actually thinking about it, and she can practically taste the badness of that idea: there are a lot of thoughts to do with floating grey hair and lying on her side in the reeking back of a van, and she can feel them massing just beneath the surface. If she stops once, she’s fairly certain, she’ll burst into tears, and she must lead the safest life on the Grid; she owes it to herself and everyone who’s been through worse to turn up on time and do her job.

She can tell, once she’s got there, that people are going out of their way to be nice to her. Zaf leans against her desk and flirts for five minutes solid, and Adam brings her tea, and even Fiona smiles brilliantly and says “I hear we’ve got quite a bit to thank you for.” And they’re her colleagues, and she cares for them, and it would be entirely unfair to resent any of them for being -- well -- people who aren’t there, so she smiles and soaks in the attention and carefully doesn’t think about anything but gratitude and fondness and the slow trickle of money from one dodgy bank account to the next, all the way until lunchtime.

Harry doesn’t come out from behind his glass until well after that, and she tries not to mind _that_ either. It can’t be healthy, to be her age and so aware of whether the man she works for pays attention to her or not: that way lies both madness and every likelihood of making an idiot of herself.

But he _does_ , eventually, stop at her station, and she does her absolute level best to keep her eyes on her screen: he’s not tall, Harry, and not young, and not especially exciting-looking, and she’s surrounded by ungodly attractive men, and not a single one of them makes her feel all thumbs and nerve endings the way he can simply by glancing to and away from her.

“Adam tells me,” he says, “you’re an unexpectedly dangerous woman.”

The pen she’d been trying to twiddle nonchalantly between her fingers hits the desktop. “Oh. Well. It wasn’t --”

“I believe the words he used were ‘never piss her off.’” He’s smiling, small but genuine, and she can’t help but beam back. “I should congratulate you for once again keeping a remarkably level head in an unforeseen crisis.”

She’s still trying to find the words for “thank you” when he leans across her desk, close enough to make her start.

“But if you _ever_ walk straight into an unknown situation with no weapon, no planning, and no backup ever again, Ruth, I will personally demote whatever happens to be left of you to fetching coffee and handing round pens at diversity training seminars. Are we quite clear?”

And she ought to feel stupid, she _does_ , but he looks steadily at her and something inside her is rising like a balloon with its string cut, up and up into thin air, as she tries to stop smiling and say “Yes, Harry.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> River Song, in between trips.

She wakes up in the middle of the woods as the sun's going down. Or coming up, she can't tell to begin with: the bag with her compass in it is fifteen feet up a thorn tree. She'll have to go up after it sooner or later, but she isn't desperate enough yet to start ripping herself open. The first-aid kit won't be half enough to offset it; she'd brought a vial of nanogenes with her, tucked in between the needle gun and the lipstick and the radiation film, but Port Authority had found the false bottom to her suitcase and given her all sorts of nasty looks. Made her sign things: _no, Officers, I will not bring my filthy galactic technology onto a reservation world._

She wonders how they'd feel if they saw her now. Probably say it served her right.

Leaves in her hair. Thick blue-green air all around, humid enough to remind her of breathing water. She's already aching all over from the stun, and she's got no idea which way is camp. If camp's even still currently there anymore.

Moss doesn't grow on any particular side of the trees around here. She's really going to need that compass. And she's done worse to herself in the name of less; skin-dove through screamingly radioactive water, once, all the alarms going off so loudly that she ought to have been able to feel the damage on her skin. And that one was mostly about proving a point.

There's no way of getting a message away from here. Nothing museum-quality within -- miles, probably. As much distance as two mutineers are willing to haul the gravity sled she can't believe anyone had managed to bring down from orbit. And the canopy's too heavy for anything she does to show up from the air; she's not getting the Doctor to help her out with this one.

There are things that come out at night, around here, if it is night. She needs the bag. She needs to start walking. Being an action heroine looks so much more glamorous on Career Day than it does in real life, sometimes.

Anything she could wrap her hands in would be coming off her body.

The bag's full of _something_ , at least, from the way it hangs, and she's almost positive they weren't ruthless enough to fill it with rocks. She remembers hearing the words "-- fair chance." The mutineers were local talent: they'd never heard of her. That always makes it easier.

Even if there's nothing left at camp, she'll be in a clearing. She can spell out HELP in rocks. She can set something on fire. That ought to get _someone's_ attention, up on the orbital; surely they'll write off a little environmental damage in the name of saving at least one human life. She's almost positive.

"Heads are going to _roll_ for this," she says, and something bolts off deeper into the trees disturbingly nearby. Right. Action _now_. At least they've left her her boots.

She could do _such_ a better job of stranding someone in the woods than most people ever seem to manage, these days. It's almost depressing.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tom Quinn, coming down.

Five weeks until Tom sleeps through the night. The phone not-ringing jolts him awake two or three times before dawn, those nights he manages to shut his eyes. He's exhausted in every sinew, all the time, and he slept better out on the streets.

Shelter. Food. Security. He can do those on autopilot. Pay the rent. Keep the cupboards stocked well enough to choke down three meals a day, no matter whose blood you had to shampoo out of your hair before you sat down. Check every corner, every time, because you can be careless every day until the day it kills you and you'll never know which one that is. It's only the finer details that keep eluding him: it takes three worried looks from the corner-shop clerk before he realizes he hasn't shaved in a week.

There are more hours in an unstructured day than he could ever have imagined. He wonders where they go. Daytime telly apparently possesses great and terrible powers of time-absorption, on a scale entirely unknown to the modern intelligence services: it's when he realizes he's developed a favorite chat show that he starts to worry.

He doesn't ring Ellie. He puts a lot of time and effort into not ringing Ellie. It's been two years and she's probably married an accountant by now. Left the country. Changed her name and all her phone numbers and gone underground, somewhere even Ruth would have to dig to find her. It's not even her he misses like a wound torn in his side; if it's anything, it's the life he pretended to have with her. The life of someone who'd know what to do with a few weeks off.

He should be getting his future in order. There are options. He's aware of them, even if he'd sooner go on assistance than give most of them a try.

Tessa's out there howling her head off at him. He can just _tell_.

He wonders how many of the people he passes on the street every day are being given his life as a cautionary tale. It's more than one: in a city the size of London you're in proximity to an undercover agent more often than anyone not on serious psychiatric drugs would want to credit. He's changed all his routines, but operations run everywhere.

And then one day there's a postcard under his doormat. View of the London Eye and an address on the back in thick black felt-tip, and if people are going to write in block capitals they ought to think twice about leaving in the Greek E's everyone's seen in the margins of every computer-parts catalogue to enter the building.

He only knows one person who might willingly live in Montana.

The postcard fits perfectly into the hollowed-out space behind the skirting in his bedroom. He's aware of it all that night.


End file.
